Irascibly Alli Lemon
- Patrick Theimer
- 22 hours ago
- 4 min read
I first encountered Hedda Sterne as a literal head above the rest in a 1951 Life magazine picture of the then labeled “Irascibles”, a group of artists who had drafted a protest targeting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a “conservative art establishment” repressing the modernist movement. Hedda was the one and only female among the 18 artists pictured, a who’s-who of the modern art elite that included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still. Hedda stood on a table for the photo, and it was really only circumstance that positioned her as the lone female. She was not the only female artist protesting, nor were the 18 pictured the only artists in solidarity. But that just happened to be the day the photographer showed up, and she made the brilliant call to jump on a table for it. Though she eventually described it as "probably the worst thing that happened to me", I feel selfishly grateful for it because it’s what eventually allowed me to see her.
Today I had the opportunity to visit the current exhibition at Concept Art Gallery entitled Found: Featuring the work of Natalie Moffitt, Jamie Earnest, Alli Lemon and Zoe Walsh. I went because I’ve been following a couple of the artists for some time and I appreciated the opportunity to see their new work. But it was my first time seeing Alli Lemon, and Alli, it turns out, was the artist standing on the table. For the first time since I’ve been looking at contemporary artists in Pittsburgh, I left the exhibition reconsidering how I’ve looked at another artist from the modern art past. I understand Hedda Sterne better now.
The Carnegie Museum of Art houses one of my favorite Hedda Sterne paintings — Horizon II — and it used to hang to the right of de Kooning’s Woman VI, cornered against a Morris Louis, exactly opposite a Joan Mitchell and a Mark Rothko, and caddy-corner Jackson Pollock’s Number 4. So let’s first step back and appreciate that positioning… I mean, come on… humbling. Next, let’s appreciate its alignment in the canon of abstraction. Hedda explored many styles before and since Horizon II. I offer Airport #1, 1948, N.Y. #6, 1952, New York, NY 1955 at the Whitney (spray paint!!), and Untitled, 1983 (all below). In each there is a geometry of shadows, an eclecticism of perverse shapes, and an arranged hierarchy of surrealistic symbolism. But as with almost every Sterne painting, I feel I’m viewing from within a convex lens. There is the simultaneity of zooming both in and out, a sense of seeing both above and at face, and a dreamy recall of dimensional groove. Hedda discovered with line what Rothko found with color field. I’ve always felt with Hedda a discovery of life.
I think Hedda was at her best with spray paint, and I wish she had pursued that more. But she came out on the other end with a body of work spiritually fractal in its ability to conform to the requirements of the viewer. Her line is sharply muted to aberrant shadow, her color stoic and chiseled. Her paintings are an exercise in sculpture, flatly surfaced but prismatically layered. She is entirely unique, and woefully under recognized.
So that was my influence as I became fixated with Alli’s Morning Fall (Oakland). It wasn’t until I read Alli’s artist statement that I understood her juxtaposition of photography and paint. The real is lost in light and the angles of shadows, the print almost deaccessed to colored geometry. It’s a painting of collaged reality, and I was lost waiting for a sun to shift the shadows left or right. Fossilized impressions float like sunspots to anchor the windowed grid centering a modern ode. There is a very constructed appeal to futurism, constructivism, and the angst of Malevich. The refraction of angled planes beacons a nude descending staircase. Fossilized fauna impress the discovery of a buried history.
Similar to Sterne, I find Alli’s paintings to be a deconstruction of light’s discovery. A painting’s energy is often hidden in the pockets of negative space harnessing the light we perceive muted. So that light is only as bright as the awareness we are made to believe. An artist’s magic is their ability to keep our attention on the formless pliability of light’s shaped recognition. And so light suddenly becomes memory. Lines suddenly become shape. The most abstract becomes the most real. What we recognize is what we want the picture to be.
Alli’s use of photography to pull in a history of recognition augmented by light’s reconstruction is a brilliant tug on our emotional currency to see. That’s what I took back to the way I reconsidered Hedda’s paintings, the way the light she pulled from the shadows drafts a recognition of remembrance I had not previously considered. We bring to everything we see our history of seeing. When an artist is able to use that knowing, that predisposition, to finish the painting they started, we are forever in its quantum debt. And that’s a table to stand upon.
Alli Lemon is exhibiting at Concept Art Gallery until April 4, 2026. Definitely worth the visit!
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